If you change a page’s URL, a redirection will send traffic from the old address to the new automatically.

This is particularly crucial if you’re doing a website redesign and have made changes to the permalinks or re-worded some of the URLs in the process. Without redirects, people who find your old URL (through links, or search engine results) will ended up on a 404 page (“page not found”). A redirection simply points visitors to the right place.

An easy redirect solution in WordPress

There are several ways you can go about creating redirects, including editing your .htaccess file, the Redirection plugin is free in the WordPress repository and works like a charm.

Once you install and activate the Redirection plugin, all you’ll need is a list of your “old” URLs and the “new” URLs you want to point them to.

A great way to keep track of this, especially on a large site that has many redirects, is by creating a spreadsheet. In ‘column a’ put in the relative URL from the “old” URL (a relative URL is everything after your TLD), and in ‘column b’ put the full URL of where you want the user to be redirected to.

Using the Redirection plugin, you can import a CSV file of all of your redirects from your spreadsheet, or simply enter them in one-by-one.

For a full tutorial, check out this video from WPBeginner: